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I’ve been meaning to learn Ember.js to cross-compare it against AngularJS. So I set myself to writing a Heroku application with Ember and Ruby on Rails. From what I heard they’re are supposed to work together magically… I was kind of right, kind of wrong.

*****IMPORTANT*****: You can still view the source code, but this app is now deprecated and no longer works on Heroku. See the MEAN Checklist app for a complete rewrite of this.

What was painful

Rails required a lot of adjustments to deliver data and Ember.js also requires a chunk re-configuring. There was little out of the box magic between both of them. Authentication with Ember’s simple auth plugin was a mess. Mainly because it, like most Ember related docs, is in a bit of messy transitional state between Ember 1.0 and 2.0. Google search results can be a nightmare since a lot of people are still using and writing material for 1.0.

What I like about Ember.js

The structure of Ember.js over AngularJS is more structured. As it has much better standards and specific ways of doing things. But, if you want to deviate from its standard way of doing things you’ll probably run into an avalanche of issues. Still, this is probably the best MVW / MVC framework for building something with a large team.

The Ember CLI is just as magical as Rails’ equivalent system. It does everything you want and even sets up the beginnings of a nice TDD environment. The CLI is years ahead of the Yeoman AngularJS equivalent.

View the live app

It took me about 2 weeks and 40 hours to get everything fully functional. Source code for the app is available and you can play with it live on heroku at the link below.

I mentioned in an earlier post that I’m launching a game development company. I’m happy to announce that Clever Crow Games is officially live and running. We’re planning on updating the site’s development journal on a weekly basis with our progress.

Today only (April 9th), Manning Publications is offering my book HTML5 in Action 50%. The book focuses on building HTML5 apps with JavaScript through various APIs. I wrote the chapters on visual APIs with Canvas, SVG, and WebGL that walk you through building retro game clones. Book is almost done, so this is a great time to get a copy before it lands on shelves.

Looking to use WebGL for Internet Explorer? If so, you wont be able to without IEWebGL. This new library allows developers to support a majority of WebGL’s features in IE. Oddly, all major browsers except IE now support WebGL. Which begs the question “Why doesn’t IE support WebGL?” Since this is a complicated subject, I’ll sum everything up as briefly as I can.